Rearranging the Disaligned
by bonestrewn
Summary: "When she spun out the list of all those little, killing offenses, the ones that ground her down day by day, she wondered why she ever married Regina." When Emma Swan comes to Storybrooke, Regina realizes that the bounds of the curse are not finite and writes Miss Swan a new story. Swan Queen.
1. Chapter 1

_Note: This is my first Once Upon A Time fic, my first Swan Queen fic, my first time writing any of these characters in seriousness. The result is a story that's basically me just feeling around trying to get a firm purchase on a subject I'm not perfect with yet. I apologize in advance for any flaws of characterization, style, or pacing – I'm still learning!_

* * *

Emma, sitting in the window seat, barely lifted her head when she heard the door downstairs open and close. There was a light rain falling outside, and she wanted to keep her head pressed against the cool window. Kept her headache – boredom-induced – from pounding any deeper into her skull.

She blew out a long breath. _On a scale of one to a million,_she asked herself in Henry's voice, mimicking his gift for hyperbole, _how bad is your headache? _She pressed her lips together and responded, _Only about a five hundred on the Regina Scale._

It was kind of an assholeish thing to do, if you thought about it – no, even if you didn't think about it, it was a pretty dick move. But Henry and Emma had fallen into the habit years ago – she couldn't remember when – of referring to personal hurts, injuries, and pains on the Regina Scale. Henry scraped his knee? Don't worry, Emma, it's only a seven hundred fifty on the Regina Scale, do we have any Incredible Hulk band-aids?

Emma finally lifted her head away from the window and rubbed her forehead with her palm, wishing that you could rub away headache pain like you could rub the soreness out of a limb. She had some book open in her lap – a _history _book – and she'd gotten maybe twenty pages into it before she lost even the pretense of interest and looked out the window instead, wishing she could be outside, _doing _something. Or at least watching some goddamn TV.

Of course, they'd had that conversation. Two conversations, actually – the TV one and the outside one – and both of them ended with Emma not getting what she wanted, so she really preferred not to dwell on that, thanks. Lingering over her past conversations with Regina felt like poking a bruise. It had taken her a while to get used to talking to a politician, because every conversation was a debate, something to be wrestled to the ground and won, and unfortunately you couldn't _literally _wrestle an argument down because Emma had the feeling she'd be winning _that _one, but once things went into the sphere of talking points, Emma was all but helpless. Regina won every time. Next time, Emma thought grimly, they'd arm-wrestle. Then they'd see who was the boss here.

"You should get away from that window, dear."

Emma startled, but it was only Regina, crossing the room in that silent way she had. She blew out a long breath and said, trying to match Regina's effortlessly smooth, domestic tone, "Should I, dear?"

Regina gave her a little smile, and Emma _knew _she wasn't imagining the faint edge of condescension there, but even if she wanted to try to pick a fight Regina was bending down to kiss her forehead, obscuring her expression, and just like always, Emma went kind of dopey at the touch of Regina's lips to her skin.

Regina's hand slipped into the thick curls at Emma's nape and gently tilted her head back so she could kiss her on the mouth, and like an idiot, like a traitor, Emma submitted.

"You'll catch your death from that draft," Regina murmured against her lips.

"Not if you warm me up," Emma said, her voice like frayed velvet.

Regina chuckled and released her; freed, Emma shook her head and blinked, rolling her shoulders like a dog released from its collar. "We have Henry's play tonight, remember?" Regina said. "That's why I'm home so early? So we can get ready?"

"Right, yeah," Emma said, "I remember." How could she forget? It was all Henry'd been talking about since Regina bullied him into trying out. No – that was unfair. Henry had wanted to do it once he found out that it was about fairy tales. Regina had just given him the initial push.

In this weird shared motherhood thing they had going on, Regina was usually the bad cop, most often in pursuit of Henry's advancement. She pushed him to join the baseball team, the chess club, the Young Scholars group. ("Wait, seriously?" Emma had said the night Regina brought it up. "A club called Young Scholars. In an elementaryschool." Though Regina patronizingly explained that it was only for the brightest students who were looking to forge the best possible future, Emma privately called bullshit.) The school play had been the next logical step, and Henry, who hadn't inherited his mother's love for the spotlight, dragged his feet off to sign up. Then he'd found out it was a play about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and suddenly the school musical had eclipsed the importance of even The Hulk Vs. Wolverine.

"You're not going to wear this, are you?" Regina said, hooking her finger into the collar of Emma's slightly ragged sweater and tugging, as though it might unravel completely and cease its offense.

"Oh – no," Emma said, looking down at herself. "No, I'm not. I'll get dressed."

Regina gave her another kiss, this time to her temple, and disappeared into the hall. There was no carpet to swallow her footfalls there; Emma could hear her going into the bathroom. The shower turned on after another minute or two.

Ten minutes for herself, then. Tops.

Emma went to the closet, trying to shuffle off Regina's influence, the way all her senses had gone fuzzy and deadened. It was funny; she stayed home all day, but she only had this feeling of – stolen time, she guessed – when Regina was in the house. Being under Regina's attention felt, sometimes, like standing in the glare of a floodlight, nothing hidden. Whenever Emma had time to herself with Regina in the house, she counted the seconds, hoarded the minutes. Soon Regina would come back and Emma would slip back under whatever spell the other woman had on her.

Emma grimaced, pushing around a few of the hangers in the closet, uninspired by the contents. Under Regina's spell – she sounded like Henry reading from that big fairy tale book he was always lugging around these days.

She plucked at the hem of her sweater. She _liked _this sweater. Regina, though, found her taste in clothes "appalling," and right around when she'd insisted on confining Emma to the house like a Victorian invalid, she'd bought her a whole bunch of new clothes too. This whole sleek wardrobe was _so _Regina, and naturally they were the only clothes Emma was technically allowed to wear.

She took out a neat businesslike blouse, a pair of slacks, grumbling at the indignity of it all. On the Regina Scale, though, this was just background radiation. The only thing in the closet that really registered, at a whopping nine hundred and fifty-two, was the neat, orderly row of _high-heeled shoes._

Ugh.

_That _was one place where Regina couldn't gain ground. She'd bought the shoes but couldn't make Emma wear them. Then again, Emma couldn't convince Regina to let her wear sneakers, so it was kind of an impasse. She had to wear these flats that were the only place where their fashion tastes intersected, black and deceptively comfy and without much ornamentation.

She really missed her sneakers, though.

She blew out a long breath and fished a bra out of the underwear drawer. Such were the domestic details of her happy home life. Worrying about _clothes. _She used to _do stuff_, before she and Regina got together. After the wedding, though, it had just been _agreed_ (was Emma even there when this agreement was made? Regina claimed yes, but Emma had her suspicions) that someone had to stay home and take care of Henry, who was only in second grade then and who _really _needed a mom waiting at home with milk and cookies, because he was already showing the warning signs of a hardy loner. And Emma, well – she was just the Deputy Sheriff, right? She was the replaceable one. Not Regina, who kept the entire town running.

So Emma stayed home and waited with the milk and cookies. She helped Henry with his homework on the late nights, did the dishes, read some of the books that Regina insisted on buying her so that Henry would have _two _good influences, instead of just one. Never mind, of course, that Emma wasn't really the intellectual book-reading type. She was more into HBO. She didn't know what ranked higher on the Regina Scale – having to stay home all the damn time, having to pretend to read Regina's books? Even when they had fights – and they _fought –_ those blew over like sunshowers, happening only when Henry was out of earshot, out of the house or asleep, taking place in angry whispers unless Emma got _really _angry and tried to get loud, and then, condescendingly, Regina would tell her, "Don't raise your voice at me, Miss Swan," like they weren't fucking _married. _Domestic partnered. Whatever.

Those fights had nothing on the small intrusions on Emma's dignity. The shoes, the books, the "dear, Sidney told me he spotted you wandering around town like a _vagabond, _perhaps it would be better if you kept _inside_."

When she spun out the list of all those little, killing offenses, the ones that ground her down day by day, she wondered why she ever married Regina. Sitting in the window seat – the one Regina had installed so Emma could look out on the world she wasn't allowed to join – Emma numbered the pains, the loneliness, the aborted freedoms. She counted every ache of wanderlust, every moment when she pined for something more. Some life that didn't involve this sterile lovely house, the perfectly tended lawn, the boring books, the designer heels, Regina's CDs playing on the stereo system instead of Emma's Rolling Stones albums. Hadn't she lived that life before? Hadn't she been free before they got married?

"That looks lovely, dear," Regina said from the doorway, and Emma turned, doing up the last button on the white blouse, summoning a weak smile. At the sight of her wife, her mind went pleasantly blank. Regina was wearing that fuzzy robe Emma _really _liked, and she was toweling her hair, and, makeup-less, free of the confines of her work clothes, she looked like some kind of... She looked like a... She looked _really _sexy.

"You look good, too," Emma managed to say, and Regina gave a little laugh, walking past her on bare feet to take out her own outfit, probably pre-chosen to avoid the fuss of staring blankly into her closet the way Emma always did. Emma turned to watch, biting her lip a little, keenly conscious of Regina's nudity, that all it would take was unbelting the robe, and...

Emma exhaled heavily, closing her eyes and rubbing her head again. The headache, briefly banished by the distraction of getting dressed, was back in force; even if Regina let Emma stick her hands into that robe and explore, it would only make the pain pound worse in her skull.

"Are you alright?" The moment was gone; Regina was already half strapped into her lingerie again, binding herself back up, and all that potent human fragility that Emma loved so much was disappearing under the layers that made Regina into Mayor Mills. Regina was turning back into that person who told Emma to stay in the house, to stop working, to do what she was told. That person who made her unhappy.

"Yeah, I'm fine," Emma said. "I'm just gonna... I have a headache. I'll take something for it before we leave."

Regina didn't look completely convinced, but gave her a smile and a nod anyway, crossing the space between them to give Emma another light kiss, a pat on the cheek, the way you give a good dog a treat. "Make sure you do," she said. "Henry's counting on us."

"Have I ever let him down?" Emma asked and she smiled, fake as plastic.

* * *

The play wasn't half bad. Henry played one of the dwarves – Sneezy. It was a pretty good casting choice; Henry, like most elementary school boys, was on the smaller side, and Emma could see where his narrow, peaked face could summon cold season. They'd rubbed pink-red makeup on his nose and cheeks and at opportune moments he sneezed hugely into an oversized handkerchief, probably doing an impression of that terminally bacterial pharmacist in town.

Emma and Regina did that whole proud parents thing, laughing and crying at the appropriate moments, but Emma, glancing over at Regina in quiet moments, saw in the dim light of the auditorium that the other woman wasn't perfectly – pleased. Hadn't this been what she wanted? Was Henry messing up in some way – should he have gotten a bigger part, whistled the dwarves' song more closely on-key, sneezed louder? Emma decided as Snow White, a fifth-grade girl, bit into an apple and dramatically choked, that if Regina said _anything _to Henry after the show, they'd have a throw-down right in the elementary school. There was no way that Regina was going to ruin this for their kid.

The play came to a dramatic conclusion, with Prince Charming pretending to kiss Snow White's cheek, the dwarves cheering, the Evil Queen looking wicked as she cursed this twist of fate. Then there was a clumsily executed little finale, with the Queen getting her unspecified comeuppance and Charming and Snow White marrying and they all lived happily ever after, hi-ho hi-ho and all that. This was the kind of stuff right up Henry's alley, especially after he'd gotten that fairy tale book, and Emma found herself begrudgingly grateful that Regina had badgered him into signing up.

After the show, the kids spilled out into the hallway outside the auditorium, still in their lovingly PTA-made costumes, and most of them were scooped up by their delighted parents. Compared to the joyous reunions going on around them, Regina and Henry's stiff hug was practically a handshake; it was Emma he flung his arms tightly around with an eager grin, asking, "Did you see, Emma? You saw, right? Was I good? Did you like it?"

Emma had just enough time to give Regina an apologetic glance before she told Henry, "I loved it, kid. You were great. You stole the whole show."

"You were very good, Henry," Regina said, but Henry's reaction to her, dim and unenthusiastic, was worlds apart from the look he'd given Emma. She didn't want to dwell on this new frostiness between mother and son; she had a guilty, uncomfortable feeling that she was somehow the source of it, or at least complicit – she and Henry had the Regina Scale, after all. Kids were perceptive about these things, even without hearing one of their parents use the other as a measure for pain.

She'd really have to get rid of this whole Regina Scale thing.

Just as she was ruefully considering how immature that whole invention seemed right now, Henry pulled on her arm and said, "Hey, there's my teacher! I want you to meet her! Miss Blanchard!"

The woman approaching them, pixie-cut and pale, had a kind of fey look to her; Emma knew her, vaguely, from the parent-teacher conferences she attended almost in name only. Regina was always the active party at those meetings; she'd been a little mean to Henry's previous teachers but Miss Blanchard received some of Regina's most savage, cutting jibes, maybe because, with her marshmallowy sweetness, Miss Blanchard was such an easy target.

"We know Miss Blanchard, dear," Regina said, and gave the poor woman a smile like a drawer of knives.

"Mayor Mills," Blanchard squeaked. "Mrs. – Miss – I, uh –"

"Emma," said the confusing party in question, accustomed by now to this kind of fumbling. "It's fine." Emma had to make a quick decision between two evils, and said, "Henry, why don't you go introduce your mom to the other dwarves?" When he turned a piteous glance on her, she gave him a slightly harder, urgent look, trying to impress upon him that this was a matter of life and death for his teacher. Persuaded but not necessarily willing, Henry took Regina's hand and led his confused mother away.

"Thank you," Miss Blanchard sighed. "I mean – not that I don't, er –"

"No, I get it," Emma assured her. "It's fine. Regina is – she's, uh, polarizing." That was obviously one of Regina's own five-dollar words, and, coupled with the fifty-dollar Regina clothes she was wearing, Emma had to grimace, wondering if the only difference between them now was the color of their hair.

"You're a braver woman than I, Emma," said the teacher, and Emma blew out a long breath, not wanting to have to think about her marriage as a matter of bravery, battles to be fought.

"Miss Blanchard," she started to say, but was gently cut off:

"Mary Margaret," Blanchard said. "Please."

"Mary Margaret," Emma repeated, "look, I – I know I haven't been as... _Invested _in our meetings as Regina. I mean, I love Henry, but..." But picking on teachers was most definitely Regina's job, not hers. "Is he happy?" The question slipped from her as her gaze caught on the scene across the room, Henry trying to introduce Regina to Doc and Dopey and Regina doing it all wrong, her smile too big, her posture too stiff, not fooling anyone. "I mean, uh – does he – how does he seem to you?" She fumbled, trying not to sound like such a terrible parent, the kind of – not-mother who was so oblivious that she couldn't keep an eye on her own kid's happiness.

Mary Margaret's voice was mercifully absent of judgment, striking just the right note between understanding and sympathy. "He seems... Distant," she said. "From the other children, at least. He acts like he's carrying a very heavy burden, and that burden is isolating him."

It sounded irresistibly like Wolverine. "But that, it's... It's just his age?" she said. "I mean... Maybe he just thinks he's the Batman or something, right?"

Mary Margaret smiled at her with the sort of benign condescension a nun might show when asked if Jesus Christ was _really _her Lord. "Even if his feelings don't have a cause we can see," she said, "it doesn't mean they're not valid." Emma sighed, dropping her gaze to her feet, wishing she dared to scuff her shoes on the floor; with no outlet for her nervous energy, she just shoved her hands in her pockets and looked up to Mary Margaret again, who gently encouraged her, "Maybe you should ask _him _about it. He obviously loves you a lot. And it might help iron out some of the other, um... The other..."

Mary Margaret's voice faded away as Regina, hands in the pockets of her jacket, swanned back to them with that hard smile back on her face, the one she reserved for people she _really _didn't like. Emma immediately took her hands out of _her _pockets, not wanting them to be one of those couples that had the same mannerisms.

"Emma," Regina said. "Why don't you take Henry out to the car and wait for me? I want to have a quick chat with Miss Blanchard. I told Henry we'd pick up some ice cream on the way home."

Emma felt her figurative backbone fold and wither away under the force of Regina's gaze, and she said, "Yeah, sure, okay. C'mon, kid," and Henry, his backpack slung over his shoulder, followed Emma out of the school into the parking lot, where Regina's Mercedes was waiting for them.

_Ask _him _about it,_Mary Margaret had said. Instead of sitting in the front, Emma folded herself into the backseat with Henry; for a moment, she missed her Bug ferociously. "Look, kid," she said, "I wanted to, uh, I wanted to talk."

She saw something close defensively in his hazel eyes, which seemed in that moment dark like Regina's. "Okay," he said.

She exhaled heavily, trying to figure out how to put this. "It's... I was just thinking, you know, you've been acting kind of different," she said, wishing for Regina's political semantics, Mary Margaret's caretaking vocabulary. "It looks like you haven't been doing so well and I just... Is there something on your mind, kid? Is there something you want to tell me?" She looked at him, trying to convey all of those I'm-here-for-you let-it-all-out encouragements that seemed too mushy and cliché to say aloud.

Something had lit up in Henry's eyes again, and he said, surprising her with the force in his voice, "_Yes! _Emma, I've wanted to tell you for _ages!_" He pulled open his bookbag and hauled out his book of fairy tales. "Look, I've figured it all out!"

"Figured what out, kid?" Emma said, hoping that he'd discovered the imp's real name was Rumplestiltskin so the princess could keep her baby or something.

"_Everything_," he said. "Like why my mom is the way she is. Why _you're _so unhappy."

Emma startled, her throat tightening suddenly. "You – what?" The words came out hoarse. Had Henry really figured it out so completely?

"Look," Henry said, and opened the book to a color illustration of a woman in black. "This is why you're unhappy! You weren't supposed to be together! My mom's the Evil Queen. _And you're the savior._"


	2. Chapter 2

_Note: Thank you all so much for your kind, wonderful reviews! I am so, so grateful to all of you for reading, favoriting, and following – all of this is more than I could have hoped for. I hope that this clears up some of the questions raised by the first chapter. I don't know much of the etiquette on this site, whether or not it's normal to respond to reviews, but if you'd like to chat or open up a dialogue please feel free to PM me, I would love to talk to you wonderful people!_

_**Please note that this chapter contains a sex scene involving dubious consent. It is non-graphic and relatively mild, but may still be triggering. Feel free to skip to the first divider in the text to avoid the scene in question.**_

* * *

Regina was very pleased with herself. Mary Margaret Blanchard was now thoroughly educated on what gifts were _acceptable _to give to Henry, and Emma was waiting for her in bed, a short walk away.

The two satisfactions went hand in hand. She wasn't sure if Emma had ever picked up on how ravenous she was in bed after those parent-teacher conferences, but there was just something so thrilling about putting that woman in her place again and again, seeing her squirm and fret and fear. It made Regina want another kind of thrill entirely.

Pursing her lips, she glanced over her shoulder at the bathroom door, remembering the wan look Emma had worn all day – the one that had magnified when Regina joined her and Henry in the car after the play. Regina herself had been aglow with pleasure; the little boy playing Doc had said something to Henry about 'that book Miss Blanchard gave you,' which finally gave a source to that ugly old tome of fairy tales Henry had been carrying around.

"I believe you're forgetting," Regina had said to her, "the _ethical responsibilities _you have as a teacher. Your influence has certainly not been a boon to Henry. I hope you'll refrain from showing him _favoritism _in the future." Mary Margaret had cowered, and Regina had almost laughed.

Then she'd gotten into that gloomy car and her mood nearly deflated. She didn't understand why Emma looked so pale, nor why she'd been getting out of the back seat. "Henry and I were talking," Emma had said, and wouldn't go into it. Probably one of their absurd comic book conversations had taken a turn against Emma's chosen favorite. Something childish like that.

Regina gently stroked away the last of her mascara. She wasn't blind to the chill that had recently invaded her home. Henry was distant, Emma was cold. That would have to change. The holidays were coming up – that always perked up the whole town. And Henry had been excited to dig into his Rocky Road ice cream after the play – getting ice cream had been _her _idea. He couldn't hate her _so _much, could he.

She paused, her hands stilling where she was rubbing in her overnight moisturizer. _No_, she told herself. _He couldn't._

She didn't want to dwell on that now. Emma, her masterstroke, was waiting in her bed. Regina massaged the last of the lotion into her jaw and surveyed her silk pajamas in the mirror, considering...

A few minutes later, Regina, wrapped in her robe, gently opened the door to Henry's room, looking in on him. His softly glowing nightlight spun nebulous shapes onto the wall and silhouetted his sleeping frame; the rise and fall of his breath made her sigh, satisfied, and she drew back, returning to the hall. A few more steps to the bedroom she shared with Emma; this time, when she opened the door, she wasn't quite so pleased with what she saw. The narrow band of dim light that fell on the bed from the open door showed her that Emma was already under the covers, her back to Regina, wearing one of her ratty, unattractive sweaters. She really didn't understand why Emma insisted on wearing clothes that made her look like a stray.

Not to be deterred, she stepped inside, closing the door behind her. The alertness of Emma's frame as Regina's weight settled on the bed cleared away the pretense of sleep; Regina moved closer, drawing blonde curls away from one ear, and lightly breathed, "Are you awake?"

Emma shivered visibly, and Regina smiled, moving forward and slipping her arm around the other woman's waist. She pressed a kiss to the fragile shell of her ear, and Emma gave another shiver; this time she said, "Regina, I – not tonight. I have, uh." She gave a clumsy, barely-there laugh. "I have a headache."

Regina frowned. "Don't be silly," she said, and shifted away; she put a hand on Emma's shoulder and rolled her firmly onto her back. She'd put on this ridiculous robe and everything, Emma's favorite.

Emma looked up at her, and there was something opaque in her eyes that Regina didn't like. The kiss that followed was not particularly gentle or loving, but it got the job done; Regina bit Emma's lower lip sharply, making her gasp, but the stroke of Regina's tongue into her mouth was met with no interest. Emma just lay there.

Regina lifted her head, lip curling. "What are you, _dead_?" she said. "With the way you've been acting these past few weeks, I thought you might want to make your behavior _up _to me. Moping around the house like a ghost. You haven't been the most attractive wife for a while now, Emma."

That woke Emma up a little, bringing some of the old spark into her eyes. "Maybe I don't _want _to be attractive to you," she retorted.

"Don't be ridiculous," Regina scoffed. "You want the same thing from me that you _always _have." This time when she kissed her, Emma responded with a little of that familiar aggressive energy, lips parting, hands tight on Regina's shoulders, and Regina was pleasantly reminded of what a good lay Emma had been before she slipped under the influence of the curse.

Eventually Emma, without much enthusiasm, pulled open the robe, and Regina lifted the sweater away, but when, finally, she slipped her hand down into Emma's battered sweatpants and stroked against her, she found her dry.

She wanted to growl, or curse, or do _anything _but play nice. Instead, she rested her forehead lightly against Emma's and murmured, "Maybe I should take things a little slower." Emma looked up at her; the aggression was gone again, the interest had fled. Undeterred, Regina dipped her head for another kiss. Emma hesitated for a moment, Regina felt her tense. Then, as always, Emma gave in.

* * *

Regina's morning shower was private. Even when Emma first expanded their little family unit and had been quite a bit more _active _than she was now, the shower was inviolable; it was where Regina, in ten minutes of water and steam, planned her day. Most often she was thinking about zoning permits, park upkeep, the school budget. Something different was spinning around in her head this morning.

_Maybe I don't _want _to be attractive to you_, Emma said again in Regina's mind as she stood under the spray of the water, and Regina pressed her lips together tightly, considering this.

She had no illusions regarding this little arrangement she'd set up. She and Emma had nothing in common, no shared interests, and no romantic history – no love nest, no secret kissing place, no tree carved with their initials. The only thing they had together was Henry and Emma wasn't even aware that she was his birth mother. (Regina fully intended to keep her in the dark on that count. She preferred Emma to believe herself the usurper, the third wheel parent; it kept her from establishing authority, claiming territory.)

It didn't surprise her, really, that their unlikely partnership was cracking open now. Regina had collared her two years before, and since then had been drawing the leash in tighter and tighter. First suggesting that Emma leave the post Regina had so helpfully given her as Deputy Sheriff to take care of Henry, because he _did _need a mother at home, he was _so _young. Then chastising her for venting her energy in long walks around town, didn't she know she was wandering like a mindless vagrant, she should stay _inside_ except if she had _things to do._And Emma rarely had things to do. It had all been a fun little exercise. How far could Regina push her? How tightly could she tangle her, tie her, trap her?

The only thing that came as a shock was how long it took for Emma to show a little initiative. Emma wasn't as weak as certain other persons in Storybrooke, and there had been a fire in her two years ago that didn't seem easily put out.

Then again, Regina was used to being disappointed on that count. Other people rarely, if ever, lived up to her expectations.

She blow-dried her hair into tame submission and dressed. Her jacket and slacks were dark today, her silk blouse light, her makeup, as ever, aggressive. When she swept downstairs on careful feet, mindful of waking Henry, she checked in surprise at the light on in the kitchen; it was before seven in the morning and normally neither child nor wife were awake at that hour, the one time when Regina had the house all but to herself.

Emma was leaning against the counter in the kitchen, looking forlornly at the apple in her hand. Regina saw the missing space in her careful arrangement of apples on the table and wished Emma might develop a little spatial awareness so she wouldn't upset the balance of the whole bowl every time she wanted a snack.

"You're up early," Regina said, the curl of a smirk adding a lascivious flash to her expression, teasing Emma. Normally her wife preferred to sleep in on the morning after.

Emma didn't rise to the bait, or perhaps, studying her breakfast prospects, she didn't notice it. "Regina," she sighed, "I think we..." She rubbed a hand through her disheveled hair, looking up from the apple. "I'd really like to talk."

Regina paused, resting her hand on the edge of the table, grounding herself. "Of course, dear," she said. "What do you want to talk about?"

Emma couldn't hold her gaze; she looked to the apple again, turning it over in her hands. Perhaps this attempt at meaningful conversation would be over before it began – that would be so much more pleasant than having to start off her day with a fumbling attempt at communication.

No such luck. "Regina," Emma said, "I... Look, I was talking to the kid the other day."

"Ah, yes," Regina said. "In the car."

"R-right. Yeah, in the car. And he said some stuff that really got me thinking." Emma turned the apple over in her hand. "I mean, he's a smart kid, Henry –"

"Of course he is."

"No, please, I really – let me finish." Emma sighed. Regina could see that this didn't come naturally for her, but she certainly wasn't going to make it any easier. Emma had brought this on herself. "He told me that I'm unhappy." A brief pause. "He was right. Regina, I'm _really _unhappy."

Regina calculated her next response to the finest flutter of her eyelashes. "Oh, darling," she said, her voice softer, and she stepped forward, putting her hand on Emma's arm, rubbing it through the fabric of that familiar, hideous sweater.

Emma gave a little twitch of her arm as though trying to discourage the touch; Regina, of course, was having none of that. Emma still plowed on: "I just don't want to _live _like this anymore, Regina." She swallowed. "If... If things were different, I'd be out the door already, you know? But..." She sighed again. "You and Henry deserve better from me." There was a grim cast of determination in Emma's expression.

It seemed that the little girl had grown up. Regina had married a terminal wanderer, but it was a determined, settled woman looking back at her from Emma's eyes. What a charming, fortuitous turn of events. And surely, the problem thus stated, the little family would knit itself back together again, just in time for the end credits.

"I understand," Regina said, her voice deliberately gentle. "Darling, if that's all, you could have told me before. But really, I have to –" The rest of her sentence died in her throat as Emma straightened up, her thin mouth drawing into a tight line, brow furrowed with anger.

"_If that's all_?" Emma repeated dangerously.

Oh, dear.

"No, Regina, _it's not all_," Emma said, and in a little fit of theatrics shoved Regina's hand off her arm. "I'm your wife. I'm telling you I'm unhappy. This isn't something you can pencil into your schedule for later!"

Regina sighed. Emma's gift for bad timing had reared its head; did this really have to happen before she left for work?

"I'm tired of being this way," Emma said. Regina saw the desire in her eyes to reach out and shake her; instead, denying herself, Emma grabbed her own sweater and tugged futilely as if at invisible bonds. "I'm tired of being the stay-at-home mom and I'm tired of staying inside. I'm tired of reading your books, I'm tired of living in your house, I'm tired of wearing your _goddamn clothes!_" Her voice went up at the end, too loud in the still house, and Regina shushed her condescendingly.

There was a twitch at the corner of Emma's mouth, something like contempt, but she took in a deep breath and let it out, calming herself a little. Her voice, when she continued, was fraught and angry, but quiet: "I get it, okay? The whole Caesar's wife thing. But I don't have any _friends _anymore. I don't _do _anything. And I – I'm sick of laying around in here, making snacks for Henry and letting you fuck me on command."

Regina drew back a little, baring her teeth aggressively, barely managing to pass it off as a smile. "If you're _dissatisfied, _dear–"

"_That's what I'm trying to tell you._" Emma turned away from her, just barely restraining herself from slamming the apple down on the counter. She dropped it there instead and it rolled a little, whole and unbruised as their marriage was not.

There was a silence that might have been long, or might have passed only in a few seconds. Emma shook her head as though shaking away a thought, and finally said, "You know what Henry told me the other night? He told me he'd figured out why I'm so unhappy. He said that it's because you're the Evil Queen, and I'm the savior."

Regina had a distinct sensation of falling, though her feet were still firmly on the kitchen floor. "I'm sorry?" she said.

Emma chuckled without humor. "You're the Evil Queen," she repeated. "Everyone in this town is under a curse that you cast. Including me. I'm the savior, so you trapped me and married me to keep me from breaking your curse. Also, Miss Blanchard's my mother. She's Snow White."

"I see." Regina did see. She'd have to get rid of that book of fairy tales. "And you... What." She gave a little laugh. "You think I'm evil?"

"No, I don't," Emma said. "I think you're – a person who has her own view of the world." She paused and swallowed; the words that followed slid against one another like dominoes, a thought not meant to be spoken aloud. "I think you try to fit us all in the little boxes you think the world is made of, and you're willing to cut away the parts of us you don't like to make us fit."

Regina, taken off-guard, had to pause to try to form a response; when she'd summoned something suitably neutral, she opened her mouth, only for Emma to cut her off, turning again to face her.

"I love you, Regina," Emma told her, and the frank, direct honesty in her sea-glass gaze left Regina disarmed, unsure. "I want to make this work. Tell me you'll help me. I can't do it alone."

Left with no other recourse, Regina relaxed her expression, summoned a close-lipped smile. "Of course," she said, and reached out again to put her hand on Emma's arm, pleased to see that she didn't try to shift away. "Of course, Emma. I love you too. I'll do whatever it takes."

Whatever it took, of course, might not fit into _Emma's _definition of such. Regina wasn't worried about that. She had all day to plan what to do, especially concerning that matter of that _book._

Emma stepped forward, managing a slight smile, and cupped Regina's cheek, giving her a brief, chaste kiss. Regina appreciated her discretion – morning breath was not the most pleasant taste to carry with her to work.

"Have a good day, okay?" Emma said. "We'll talk more? Later?" Clearly the apparent success of this little enterprise had gone to her head.

"We will," Regina confirmed.

Stepping out into the brisk Maine chill gave Regina a chance to clear her head, turning the implications of the conversation over in her head.

She couldn't ascribe the book to an act of malice on Mary Margaret's part. There was an absence of motive: no one in Storybrooke remembered their past, and Snow simply wasn't cunning enough to give Henry the book and manipulate him into declaring Regina evil. Besides, who would believe him? A curse, an Evil Queen, magical revenge – all of it sounded too _fantastic. _Emma hadn't believed it; she'd probably seen it as some childish metaphor for their incompatibility instead. A nice, safe explanation.

Henry wouldn't find any support for his little theory, then. She was safe from that. Not that she was safe from the deep pang of grief, quickly buried, that shuddered through her when she realized how much he likely hated her.

Where had she gone wrong in raising him? Hadn't she done everything she could to make him happy – filled his arms with age-appropriate presents on the requisite holidays, baked him turnovers for his lunches, listened to his schoolyard dramas, soothed his bad dreams, hung on his every word like a good mother should? She had raised him from three weeks old, sacrificing sleep for his care; she showed him all the affection she could muster from the dry, twisted place inside her, trying to gift him with a tenderness not easily wrung from her mother's daughter. What was more, she had never bound him in her curse. She would not make another Regina in her son the way Cora had duplicated herself in Regina.

There was also the matter of her wife. Regina wouldn't waste time skirting around it: Henry preferred Emma. Maybe if she and Emma mended this – whatever this was, their _relationship, _his pet theory would be disproved, his book quietly removed once his attention turned to whatever childish new fad surfaced next. She didn't want to think about what might happen if the relationship fell apart and Emma fell outside her influence – what might happen to the curse, what might happen to Henry. It wasn't a risk she was willing to take.

Regina's lip curled. So she and Emma would _talk. _And they would fix their so-called marriage.


	3. Chapter 3

_Note: Hello again! Thank you all so, so much for your reviews and your follows. I am so grateful and humbled, and I hope you enjoy this chapter. This story is going along at a pretty fast clip and I'm anticipating it to be over in three more chapters at most; whether it continues from there in another form I cannot say, but I am so excited to have you guys along for the ride!_

* * *

"Look who escaped the gilded cage," said Granny as Emma crossed the threshold.

"We thought she'd killed you and put your body in the attic," Ruby confessed as Emma, sighing, sat down at the counter. A cup of chocolate materialized in front of her, decorated with cinnamon and whipped cream, hot enough to chase the bite of Maine winter out of her fingertips. She was wearing one of _her _sweaters, and one of _her _hats, and damn the consequences. She hunched her shoulders over as she leaned on the countertop, drinking in a deep breath of the hot cocoa smell, feeling like herself again for the first time since that agonizing talk with Regina earlier that morning.

She'd been... Successful. Successful-ish. Honestly, she wasn't cut out for this kind of stuff, the married people communicating thing that supposedly kept so many couples puttering along for years. The fact that she'd carried it off without a hitch – without too many hitches – spoke less to her skill than to her sheer dumb luck.

She'd thought, watching Regina's face in the last minute of her I'm-miserable-and-it's-all-your-fault speech, that she'd seen sympathy there, if not empathy. _Some _kind of understanding. She had a lot of doubts about Regina's feelings for her – whether they were complete, whether they were real – but she thought – she _hoped_– that she'd made a breakthrough. That she'd spoken to those feelings, real or fake or whole or damaged, and that Regina had understood her.

If Regina were easier to read, she might have been more confident. Emma might have a knack for spotting a liar, but she'd met her match in Regina, a dissembler of the highest order, and there was nothing like staring down a politician's blank mask to shake your confidence.

"So what's going on?" Ruby said, and mimicked Emma's pose, leaning on the counter and giving her a direct view down her thin shirt. "Running away from home?"

"No," she said, and then more firmly, "No. Just getting out a little."

"It's good to see you out of that house," said Granny from her corner. "I'm tired of the Mayor keeping you in there like a rat in a trap."

"She's not _keeping _me in there," Emma said, tasting the lie in her words. "Things are just complicated. That's all."

Granny grumbled and Ruby sighed disbelievingly. "Things are _complicated_," Ruby repeated.

Emma had ground out the last of her confessional urge that morning, and she didn't give into the temptation to tell all, to explain herself and explain Regina. That might drift dangerously into trying to _justify _Regina, and she'd thought enough poison at Regina without Ruby and her grandmother pouring it in her ears now.

"Let's just drop it," she said, and her sigh ran long. "Know if there are any job openings in town?"

"Game of Thorns is looking for a delivery girl," Ruby supplied helpfully. "But - oh. Regina sold your car, didn't she?"

Emma ground her teeth. "Yeah," she said. "Regina sold my car."

Now that she thought about it, grimly taking a swallow of chocolate, Regina had done away with most of her personal belongings. The car. Her shoes. The clothes she could be bullied into giving up. She quickly took another gulp of her drink, scalding her mouth and throat, deliberately derailing herself. Hadn't Regina listened that morning? Not perfectly, but she had. Regina was willing to talk. Regina was in this with her and Emma, though bitter, wanted to leave the old unhappiness behind, starting today.

It didn't help that there were so many scars of what had happened between them - the absence of her car, the silk blouses in her closet, the place on her hip where she used to wear her sheriff's badge. Then there were Ruby and Granny's faces, looking at her like she really was some invalid, trying to do for her what she'd done for Henry, the whole you-can-trust-me-let's-talk thing. Ruby couldn't keep the sentiments unsaid.

"How could you let her _do _that, Emma?" she asked, and her pale eyes were serious under her dark, dramatic brows. "It's okay. You can talk to us."

Emma exhaled through her nose, pressing her hands over her face and deeply regretting that clumsy gulp of chocolate. How _could _she let Regina do it? Good question. She had been a free agent before they married; in retrospect the Emma of the past seemed kind of like a cowboy, all leathery toughness, weathered by the loneliness of the prairie.

She shook her head a little at herself. That was just her being romantic about the past. Like a bachelor in a movie from the fifties who finally ties the knot and sighs longingly for the halcyon days of his youth, when he didn't have a wife on his arm who wanted him to buy toasters and crap. Marriage to Regina came with toaster included, but Emma had still been reduced, cut down to size, made to fit in the slot Regina had cleared for her in her busy, organized life. Folded up to save on shelf space.

The more she thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that she would have just let Regina do away with all of the things that made her Emma. The Bug, the clothes, the badge – they were a part of her, the way snappy suits and the apple tree were a part of Regina.

"I just..." She sighed. "I just changed, that's all. Married people change. For the sake of their marriage." It was weak. Pathetically weak. Ruby could tell, and from the look burning into Emma from across the room so could Granny. The drink in her hands was cooler now, she could take a long pull of it without causing permanent damage. "Not always for the better," she admitted, because she was trying to be fair here, and squirmed; "Do we have to talk about this? I really – I've had enough deep introspection and stuff for one day."

"You want another one?" Ruby asked. The whipped cream in Emma's cup had sunk out of view, but she shook her head.

"I'd better not," she said. "I, uh –" _Come on, Swan, think fast._"I wanted to go to the sheriff's office," she said in a sudden burst of inspiration. Really what she wanted was to duck out of sight of the women's questioning, sympathetic gazes, afraid that they'd probe too deeply, unearth something she wanted dearly to keep buried. "I was going to see Graham."

"You were?" Ruby's brow furrowed.

"Yeah," she said. "Who knows, maybe he'll give me my old job back?"

* * *

Emma's turn as Deputy Sheriff of Storybrooke had been – interesting. That was how she'd met Regina, so belated after her getting the job that it had probably been pretty rude of Graham, actually, to keep her hidden for so long. She'd been working there for a while before her official introduction to the Mayor came, and Emma wondered at the time why – and how – Graham had kept this all under wraps for so long. Regina liked to tell the story a certain way, when she was feeling romantic, talking about walking into the office fully prepared to rain down apocalypse in all directions, "when this ridiculous lanky blonde _thing _hopped up from her little desk and said, 'Madam Mayor, it's lovely to meet you, want a bear claw?'"

"That was my last bear claw, too," Emma would say. The only thing that struck her as unlikely was her saying the word "lovely" – who but Regina ever said "lovely?" – but the framework was there and it sounded right. The truth was that her early days with Regina always seemed a little fuzzy in her memory, smudging like graphite dust into some gray indefinable first date, then a succession of dates, and dates that ran late and dates that lingered into the morning and their wedding seemed to come out of the blue, though Emma had memorized the numbers like an emergency hotline, nine-twenty-two-two-thousand-nine.

Graham had been there, hadn't he? She remembered him as a dark blur in the corner of her vision at the very small reception, wrapped in a thick alcoholic smell. It was the first time she'd had to look directly at his drinking problem. Since then they'd fallen out of touch, a fact that plucked at some tight internal cord of regret; she always winced away from the thought of seeing him again, knowing that their mutual silence wasn't all his doing.

It wasn't until she was walking up to the station that something buried resurfaced. Her throat tightened a little and her jaw clenched: Graham, she'd always felt, had never liked her marriage to Regina. She hated to think about that, too – she spent an awful lot of time these days living in denial, didn't she? She hovered outside the door, rubbing a hand over her face. Her low-level headache was ratcheted up another couple of notches on the Regina Scale just thinking about seeing Graham again, having to be studied by his sensitive eyes all through another conversation like the one she'd had with Ruby. She'd have to go through it all again, fumbling and making excuses, trying and failing to explain.

You're starting over, she told herself. You're leaving the past behind.

That didn't make it any easier.

Swallowing hard, she opened the door and stepped into the police station, tucking her hands into the sleeves of her sweater, folding her arms over her chest. There was the familiar smell of coffee, leather, and dust; a box of donuts was open on one of the outer desks.

"Look who it is," said a familiar accent. Graham, lean as a sighthound, smiled at her, stepping out of his glass-walled office. "Didn't think I'd be seeing you again. I thought maybe Regina..."

"Killed me and put my body in the attic?" she said helpfully.

Graham chuckled, scratching the bristles on his jaw. "Yeah, I suppose that's as good a theory as any," he replied. "Though if I really believed that I'd've had to investigate. Then Regina would kill _me_ and put _me _in the attic."

"Sounds like something she'd do," Emma agreed, feeling her shoulders drop as she relaxed, easing into the comfort of the camaraderie. For a while she'd felt like every conversation she had was uttered over a battleground. With Graham, things came easier.

"What brings you to my neck of the woods, Mrs. Mills?" he asked, and she wanted to flinch at the name, just barely controlling herself, knowing that he was just teasing. He leaned on the edge of one desk and nudged the box of donuts towards her; no bear claws, but she picked out a glazed one and inspected it rather than address him right away.

"Maybe I just missed you?" she offered, smiling hopefully.

"I think you just missed my donuts," he said, shaking his head.

Emma sighed and mirrored his pose, leaning against the desk. "You were my ticket out of Granny's," she admitted. "Ruby wanted to know what I was going to do with my life now that I've come down from my ivory tower." She took a bite of the donut and it crumbled, dry and stale, in her mouth. Coughing a little, she said, "I told – I told her I was going to come here and see if I could get my old job back." She cracked a wry smile around a second bite of the deadly donut in her hand; this one made it down a little easier.

That was nearly undone when Graham said, "Sure, why not?"

Emma broke into coughs again; smiling, Graham pounded her back. "Th–thanks," she said, wiping her mouth. "Was I delirious from choking on your crappy donuts or did you say I could have my old job back?"

"You heard aright," he said. "Why not come back? I could use a hand here. Same as before." He shrugged. "I suppose now you're married –" she _wasn't _imagining the change in his voice, was she?– "you'd have to work different hours." He shrugged. "Maybe part-time?"

"That would be –" better than anything she could have hoped for. "_Great. _That would be _really great_, Graham." She would have hugged him if he hadn't slipped away, turning his back to her to peer out the window. She hadn't smelled alcohol on him at all. "Look – hey," she said, easing off the edge of the desk, putting the donut in her hand down. "You know you don't have to do this? I don't want to be a pity case."

It took Graham a few seconds to reply, a delay that made Emma bite the inside of her mouth briefly, wondering. "You're not a pity case," he reassured her; he turned back around then, smiling at her. "You're the best deputy I've ever had."

"I'm the only deputy you've ever had."

"Take the compliment, Emma," he said.

"You won't like me as much when I can only work until three because I have to go pick up Henry."

"We'll make it work," Graham replied, shrugging. "I need someone to file reports and answer phones and pluck kittens out of trees. You... I bet you need a distraction, being locked up in that house all the time."

Emma really, _really _didn't want to talk about that. That tie of loyalty to Regina tugged at and she heard herself say, "I wasn't _locked up _–"

"Oh, yeah, yeah, I know," Graham said, crossing back to the desk to inspect the box of donuts, coming up disappointed. "You were there of your own free will and all. True love and a happy marriage." He looked up, saw the expression on her face and quickly cleared his throat. "Ah, sorry."

Emma said, "I don't want to talk about that, Graham."

"Whatever you say, Deputy." Graham returned to his office, opened a drawer in his desk. When he came back, it was with the badge in his hand. "You're the boss," he said, and offered it to her.

Emma took the badge from him and fixed it to the familiar spot on her hip, feeling the weight of it like the pressure of a friendly hand. "Graham..."

"You're _welcome,_Emma," he said with exaggerated self-importance, and she laughed, maybe for the first time in a while. "Let's get you settled in, Deputy," and gratitude settled heavy in Emma; for a while, she could forget about everything else.

* * *

Emma hadn't been teasing when she said she'd have to leave work to pick up Henry from school. Normally, they would have met outside the school and walked straight home, so Henry could have a snack and start his homework; this time, Emma waited leaning against the patrol car, feeling like the world's coolest mom, the baddest badass ever to strut her way through Storybrooke wearing a badge and a hat with ear flaps. Henry emerged from the front of the school looking slightly hunched, divested of his natural glow; then, seeing Emma and seeing the car, his head lifted, his face lit up.

"Emma!" He scampered across the schoolyard to meet her. "Are you a sheriff again? Is this your car? _That's so cool!_" The last time she'd been a deputy, Henry had been seven or eight years old, as distant in time to him as Mayan civilization.

"I thought we'd drive home in style today," she said. "What do you say, kid?"

He was already opening the passenger side door, dumping his heavy backpack on the floor. "Is this a _police radio_? Awesome!"

Henry chattered to her as they drove, the usual monologue of school complaints; Emma, glancing over to him, felt worry flex in her chest: he'd taken the book of fairy tales out onto his lap. Among all the other things that had happened that day, she'd briefly been able to forget her constant, low-grade Henry worries; part of that, she knew, had to come from being his other parent, but even her miraculous powers of denial couldn't ignore the fact that their conversation in the car the other night had amplified her fears.

He'd explained things to her like he'd found the solution to a universal puzzle, etching a family tree into the air as he detailed the exploits of Snow and James-called-Charming and the Evil Queen who sought to destroy their happiness; with an eloquence unlike him, he explained that it had been prophesied that there was one who'd break the Evil Queen's curse – "That's _you, _Emma!" – and how she'd been put into a wardrobe as a baby and sent to another land (wasn't that from the Chronicles of Narnia?) to keep her safe. Then Henry laid out his theory: "When you came to town Mom realized that you're the savior," he said, "so she made you fit into the curse. That's why she married you – so you couldn't break the curse and save everyone."

"That's really the only reason she married me?" Emma had asked, and he cut her off with a sharp, "_Yes!_"

Ouch.

Her anxieties about why Regina married her notwithstanding, she was pretty sure it wasn't to keep her from breaking a curse. She'd tried to tell Henry that, but he was buzzing with excitement over finding an audience for his theories, not listening to her when she tried to let him down. When they spotted Regina walking back to the car, he'd told her urgently not to breathe a word of it to _the Evil Queen. _How was she not supposed to tell her, though? How was she supposed to keep something like that from Regina?

Didn't change the fact that she felt like total shit for breaking his trust just the morning after, trying to score points against Regina. If Henry, still chattering on with the book in his lap, noticed her guilty glance, he didn't give a sign of it. Maybe she could talk with Regina about it, when they got around to their next grueling discussion of their feelings.

"Have you thought about what I told you the other night?" he asked her very seriously, distracting her from the nervousness that bit at her when she thought about having to have another conversation about _emotions_with her wife.

"What you told me?" she said, playing dumb.

"The _curse_," he said. "You have to do something, now that you know! You have to break it!"

She sighed, turning the car onto their block. "Henry..." She shook her head a little, keeping her eyes on the road. "It's not that simple."

"Why?" he asked, that one word kids always whipped out when they wanted to confuse adults.

"For one thing, your mom's not the Evil Queen, and I'm not the savior," she said, parking the patrol car outside the house. "I... Kid, I honestly wish it were as easy as saying she's bad and I'm good, but it's not. Your mom and I..." She looked over to Henry, whose brow was furrowed, trying to take this in. She sighed. "Come on, let's get inside."

Heading up the front walk, Emma's hand on Henry's shoulder, she continued, "Your mom and I love each other, kid. The thing is that..." _The thing is that your mom's mean and I'm really bad at this commitment thing and if I were five years younger I'd be gone by now. _"Marriages are complicated," she said. "They're not black and white, good and evil, you know? And... Yeah, there have been problems, but your mom and I are making it work, okay? You don't have to worry about curses and stuff."

At the front door, Henry paused, looking up at her with a frown. "I don't think so," he said frankly. "I think I _have _to worry about the curse. 'Cause no one else is."

Emma looked down at him, hesitating a breath too long.

"Can you please unlock the front door?" Henry asked, his voice quieter, and he turned away.


	4. Chapter 4

_Note: This is it! The penultimate peril! One more chapter after this one. I was going to try to hold out like a good author, but I got so excited about writing the ending of the fic that I had to post this one tonight. Who knows, maybe I'll last a whole day before posting the last chapter? Once again, thank you all so much for reading, for following, for reviewing and I hope to see you at the finale (she said, as though the end of her short, meager fanfiction were some grand event with a red carpet)._

* * *

Regina didn't like cliché, but the phrase that came to mind as she mechanically dried the dinner plate was 'seeing red.' Emma would have to be a fool not to see Regina's hands tightening on cloth and ceramic, her shoulders tensing, her expression hardening – and Emma was certainly not a fool. She'd done this in front of Henry, after all.

"Your old job?" Regina said, her voice dangerously pleasant. "That's wonderful."

"Yeah." Henry was washing, Regina drying, Emma stacking dinnerware back in the cabinets, a position earned by virtue of the scant few inches she had on her wife. When Regina passed her the next plate, she gave Emma a look that seared.

Emma was not as cowed as Regina would have liked. She continued without missing a beat, "Graham said the hours were completely flexible. So I could be around at home but still get in some time actually working. I mean, he was doing fine without a deputy, so it's not like I'm _vital._"

"How accommodating of him." Regina accepted a wet glass from Henry, who had ignored every attempt thus far to converse or catch his eye. There had been a pall between him and Emma, too; Regina couldn't help the hope that unfurled inside her, wanting this to be some sort of pre-adolescent rite of passage – for him to grow distant from them both and then grow out of it, a passing phase she wouldn't have to worry about.

"It'll just be nice to get out of the house. Chase off some stray dogs, file some unnecessary reports to the mayor's office..." Emma gave her a cheeky grin. "It'll be fun."

Regina was not so enthusiastic. With the final piece of glassware tucked back into place, she put a hand on Henry's shoulder, feeling him tense and hating to know it was her doing. "Why don't you go finish your homework, Henry?" she said. "Emma and I will be down here if you need any help."

He gave a little twitch of his shoulder that was painfully reminiscent of his birth mother, trying to shake off Regina's hand. "Okay," he said, slipping away; abandoned, her hand closed on air, then dropped stiffly down to her side.

"Emma," she said over her shoulder, Henry's footsteps disappearing up the stairs. "Why don't we have a talk?"

Close at heel, Emma followed her into the dining room; Regina felt a hand touch the small of her back lightly, then withdraw, as if uncertain. "Regina," Emma said with that wifely solicitousness that made Regina want to recoil, "you okay?"

"I know we agreed that you should spend more time out of the house," Regina said, turning suddenly, letting Emma's unthinking steps carry her forward into Regina's physical space. "But I would like to have been _told _that you were getting your old _job _back." Emma stepped back from her; a breath of discomfort, familiar from the previous night, flickered over her face.

"I'm sorry," Emma said. "You're - you're right, of course you're right, but I thought..." She shook her head. "I thought you'd be happy for me. You know, that I'm doing something I love again? So I don't – mope around the house like a ghost?"

"That little scene was completely unnecessary." Regina turned away from her again and crossed the room to pour herself a glass of cider; the familiar smell of apple and spices rose to her, a comforting perfume. "Trapping me in there with Henry to make sure I _behaved. _I don't like being manipulated."

"Regina, that wasn't really..." She turned to glare at Emma, who sighed. "Yeah, okay, that was part of it, I was scared of what you'd say. But I – look, I thought it would be good for Henry. To see us getting along, you happy for me? Remember how he thinks you cursed me into marrying you because you're the Wicked Witch of the West or something?"

"The Evil Queen," Regina corrected her, and ground her teeth when she realized she'd done it.

"This will be _good_, I promise," Emma said. "Good for us. Good for Henry."

Regina, her back still to Emma, took a sip of cider, letting the taste blossom in her mouth. Her thumb traced the fluting on her glass briefly as she turned all of this over in her mind – the job, the scene in the kitchen, Emma's excuses, testing for weak points, trying to find her method of attack.

When she lit upon it, she barely restrained the twitch of a smirk that threatened to cross her lips. "But not for Graham," she said softly.

Regina turned around in time to see Emma, braced for a blow, blink in confusion, her shoulders dropping, disarmed. "What?" Emma said.

"We both know how he feels about you," Regina said silkily.

How Graham felt about Emma had, in fact, been part of why Regina had severed that little connection soon after the marriage, insisting that Emma quit and stay home. The fact that the heart beating in her underground vault might yet have a will of its own was galling, giving the thrill of ownership a bitter aftertaste. And he'd just had to turn his big doggy eyes on her _wife _– her wife who was the _savior_, no less.

"Regina, I don't know what you're talking about." Emma's eyes, large in her slightly ashen face, met Regina's, searching, trying to find something there – love? concern? gentleness? – to reassure herself.

"_Emma._" Regina stepped back to her, glass of cider in one hand; with her free hand she reached up to lightly stroke Emma's cheek. Emma drew back from her hand; Regina saw the discomfort of earlier return, magnified by her wife's wide eyes, her troubled gaze. As before, Regina's hand flexed, then closed, the touch denied to her, and her hand dropped back to her side, useless. Less gently, she said, "You know he hated to see you marry me. He sat there the whole reception sulking like a kicked puppy. The two of you _working _together again..."

"That's _not _true," Emma insisted, but Regina had seen her doubt; she pressed forward, pushing it, reopening the wound.

"Don't I know better than anyone how irresistible you are?" Regina smiled at her. "Emma, please, trust me. I think it would just be better if –"

Emma repeated, "_It's not true_," and when Regina tried again to touch her face, she pushed her hand away. "It's not. Regina, why do you have to do this?" The pleading note in her voice, thick under the frustration, was impossible to ignore. "Graham's my friend, and you – you're not being fair."

"Not being _fair?_" Regina's voice hardened again. Emma was being ridiculous. "I'm sorry you don't _trust _your own _wife, _Emma, but I assure you –"

"No," Emma said. "No, I'm not having this conversation."

"Weren't you the one who wanted to _talk?_ Please, Miss Swan, tell all." Regina took a long draught from her glass, emptying it and turning away again. "I'm dying to hear how you'll explain _this _one. Didn't you want us to be honest?" She replaced the glass in the bar set, knowing how Emma got when she was angry and not wanting anything fragile within arm's reach.

"I wanted us to – to not be the way we've been," Emma said. "I wanted us to be like other couples. I wanted us to act like _people who love each other._"

"And how is that?" Regina faced her."Sappy? Sentimental? Holding hands for long walks on the beach?" She could only barely restrain a roll of her eyes; that might make Emma yell. "You knew who I was when you married me, Emma."

"People who love each other don't do this," Emma said. "Christ, Regina. _You _don't like being manipulated – do you think _I _do? Do you think I'm stupid? You can't keep leading me around by the nose – expecting me to quit my job, _again_, because you invented something between Graham and me that _isn't there_."

"You're _not _stupid, Emma." Foolish, certainly. Bullheaded, absolutely. Frustrating beyond all reason, without a doubt. "You know I'm not _inventing _this – I'm insulted you'd even –"

"Okay, _maybe _you're not making it up," Emma cut her off. "But you can't trust me enough around him to let me work at a part-time job that I _love_? What do you want me to do, be a delivery girl for Game of Thorns? Wash dishes at Granny's? Or..." Emma swallowed. "You'd just – you just want me to stay inside like I have been, don't you?"

_Yes._"No, Emma, no – of course not." Regina tried to close the distance between them again but found that same reluctance was her only response; she frowned and glared. "You really don't trust me, do you?" she said. "You don't even trust your own wife."

"How can I anymore?" Emma asked.

Into the chilly ensuing silence Regina finally said, "Don't be so dramatic."

"I'm not," Emma replied steadily; she was wearing her honest expression again, that wide-eyed face she made whenever she was trying to push past the barriers that normally kept her feelings safe and hidden. "I'm not being dramatic. After the other night – after all this – you're not getting my vote, here."

"The other night?"

"It wasn't okay," she said. "Last night wasn't okay, and tonight hasn't been okay. We're married. We're partners. We're _equals. _I want you to stop trying to control me. I'm not Sidney Glass; I'm done letting you tell me what to do."

It wasn't Emma's defiance that surprised Regina; it was the jarring twitch of guilt that jerked at her in hearing the words _Last night wasn't okay, _direct and irrefutable.

Emma was looking at her expectantly; she had to do something or risk everything falling apart yet more. Regina cleared her throat, dropped her gaze, assumed a small, guilty posture.

"Emma," she said, "what do I do to make it right?"

"Regina..." Emma's arms folded around her in a sudden, tight embrace. Her face hidden, Regina didn't yet have to fake tears; she was still handling the matter of Graham in her mind, considering the measures she might have to take.

Emma was pulling back; Regina tipped her face up and was rewarded with a kiss to her lips. The thick rush of heat fell through her like passing through a waterfall; kissing Emma, touching her, always left her feeling transformed, just on the edge of trembling. Even now, when she had better things to do, she almost lost herself in that kiss, parting her lips for Emma's tongue, holding onto her shoulders tightly.

"Oh, come on," Emma mumbled. "We're supposed to be fighting."

"I like this better," Regina said, drawing away from Emma's lips, pushing thick blonde hair out of her way to press a kiss to her neck.

But Emma shook her head, and Regina, frustrated, denied again, was getting tired of having her embraces close on empty air tonight: first Henry, then Emma again and again. "Fine," she snapped, then exhaled a shaky breath, forcing her voice to relax. "It's – very well. I should be doing work, anyway."

She patted Emma's arm lightly and pushed a smile to her lips. "Why don't you go check on Henry? I'll be here for a little while."

"Y-yeah," Emma said, rubbing her neck where Regina had kissed her. "I might go watch some TV. After."

Regina caught herself about to give Emma a look. Wasn't the point of these little exercises in communication to let Emma think she had some control? That she was allowed to flaunt Regina's rules in her own home whenever she liked? "Is Law and Order on tonight?" Regina smiled. "Maybe I'll join you."

Regina hated Law and Order. She maintained the smile until Emma was halfway up the stairs; then it slid away and, free of pretense, she could think.

She went to get her cider glass, briefly tempted towards a stronger drink – Emma's influence, no doubt; but Regina wanted a clear head, not sloppy logic and loose lips. Closing her eyes as she sipped, she let the situation unfold in her mind: there were three problems here. Henry's fairy tales, Emma's disobedience, and Graham's... Well, the mere fact of Graham seemed problematic now.

The least urgent of the three was Henry and his pet theory. Children got ideas into their heads, heaven knew how, but Regina, though uneasy, wasn't threatened. She'd send him to Archie Hopper if needed, the better to convince him that his foolishness was unfounded.

Then there was Emma's misguided struggle for independence. Certainly it wasn't the _most _dangerous thing, but Regina didn't like it. The terms of the curse had been easier to manipulate than she'd thought, but she was conscious – as she was always thinly conscious of the state of the curse – that where the magic had most of the town in a tight grip, its hold on Emma was loose, dangerously so. Magic was different here and Regina was not so keenly adept as she used to be.

What might happen if Emma slipped out of her grip entirely? If she disowned Regina and shook off her influence. Would she shake away the curse as well? Was Regina's hold over her only ever as strong as the tenuous, incomplete bond between the two of them?

She topped off her glass again and crossed the house on quiet feet to the study. The question was, then, how to keep Emma, and the matter of Graham threatened that. He'd always had ridiculous ideas in his head about honor and honorable people, crying over his kills like a child over a broken toy, and he'd thought Snow White to be some rare bird of honor; though he couldn't remember his disobedience, his ridiculous principles of right and wrong, she knew that he felt the same way about Emma. It was a pity the curse couldn't do more to change who a person was at their core. She might still find him attractive if he hadn't spent so much time making eyes at Emma, hungry for the validation of a truly good person. Pathetic.

The problems of Graham and Emma were inextricable. It would be easiest to get rid of him by forcing Emma to quit; if she forced Emma to quit – Regina didn't put it past Emma to storm out, and she didn't want to think about what that might do to Henry. If she let Emma work with Graham... They were friends, and friends talked about their ailing marriages. The danger of his influence was very real, especially if he put his notions of honor and dignity and lonesome self-sufficiency in Emma's head.

He hadn't acted yet, though. It was only a matter of time before he did; Regina would have to wait, watch, and decide later. Emma already suspected her and taking action against Graham would make things worse.

The paperwork awaiting her looked less appealing now, and she could hear Emma moving through the house again. Regina left the study to join her, slipping up soundlessly at her right, and Emma startled when she noticed her there, then laughed a little.

"You're not gonna do work?" Emma said.

"Oh, there'll be time tomorrow," Regina said breezily. She slipped her free hand into Emma's and tried not to notice how she lit up at the touch, blonde hair practically aglow.

On the couch in front of the TV with a rerun playing, Regina allowed herself to relax fractionally against Emma's side, to join the domestic charade. Emma's hand rested comfortably at the back of Regina's neck, thumb rubbing over her nape, and Regina, for a comfortable moment, forgot what the purpose of all this was – forgot what she was trying to hide, forgot what she would have to do. Forgot, just then, what was so dangerous about the warmth of Emma's hand, the comfort of leaning into her embrace.

Then Emma said quietly, into the low murmur of interrogative voices from the television, "You know, I had a kid once."

Regina woke to herself immediately and only just held back from the tension that threatened her posture. Emma, holding onto her, would know. This was supposed to be news, so she said softly, "You did?"

"When I was in prison." Emma's voice faded out; onscreen, a suspect protested his innocence, a cop roughed him up under the glare of fluorescent lights. "He'd've been Henry's age."

"I can't believe you didn't tell me," Regina said, mouthing the lines of a tired script.

"I couldn't..." Emma didn't look at her. "I fooled myself a long time ago into thinking that I forgot. About him." In the soft glow of the dimmed house lights, backlit by the bluish wash of the television screen, Emma looked suddenly old and terribly sad, the lines at the corners of her mouth shadowy and deep, her ocean eyes distant. "I suddenly thought... When I was upstairs, with Henry, I thought, this is what I'd want. If I'd kept my kid, I'd want to have had a family like this, with you."

Regina, threatened by the tenderness of this moment, the words like an offered embrace, said, the edge of her voice harder, "Weren't we just fighting about how unhappy and miserable we are?"

Emma glanced sharply at her, caught on the sharp point of Regina's voice, stung into response: "Hey, you know, at least we're trying," she said. "At least we're making it work." Determined to wrench something loving and intimate out of the conversation, she moved her hand from Regina's neck to stroke the curve of her cheek, and Regina didn't know why she bothered. "We can be that family, right?" Emma asked. "The kind that doesn't give up. The kind that doesn't run away."

Regina could hear the plea for reassurance in her voice, but didn't tell Emma that she was looking for comfort in the wrong place. Emma thought that they were a family, two mommies and their little boy with the potential to be as perfect as a picture on a Christmas card if only they tried. For all that Emma had guarded herself so closely when they first met, slow to intimacy, reluctant to confess, she was proving herself very naive now.

"Of course we can, dear," Regina said, and she covered Emma's hand with her own, pressing a kiss to the soft center of her palm. "We won't give up."


	5. Chapter 5

Emma was absurdly grateful that Graham kissed her. It dismissed her own restless insecurities about their relationship – whether she would give in, whether she would succumb. Blissfully, she felt nothing. He grabbed her face and pressed his whiskey mouth to hers and she felt zip. The only thing that lingered was a kind of unhappy indifference, a pitying acknowledgment of the fact that Graham was desperate, and he was drunk, and he was being a little pathetic, and did Storybrooke have a rehab facility, or would he have to go into that dank, creepy hospital?

But he staggered back like lightning had come crashing down between them, and if Regina'd been there, maybe it would have. With distance between them, there came the anger, familiar from years of temper tantrums; she didn't know what pissed her off more: that Graham had thought he could do this and get away with it or that in doing it he'd proved Regina right. Emma had wanted so badly for this to go away in the past couple of weeks, for her return as deputy to mean an easy slip back into platonic comradeship, the kind of friendship she always wanted with the men in her life but that never seemed to happen.

"Did you see that?" Graham gasped.

"How much have you been drinking?" Emma demanded. "That was _way _over the line, Graham. I'm _married. _For God's sake, you _introduced _me to Regina."

With the booze smell rolling off him in sickening waves, Graham said, "I just – I just wanted to feel –"

"Look," she said, heading him off. "Whatever it is you're wanting to feel, you're not getting it with me."

He looked at her, eyes glassy from drink, and she felt kind of bad but much more angry than anything else. "You'd better go home and sleep it off," she said, and turned away. She had a wife and kid waiting for her.

Working as a deputy had been easy, at work and at home – so easy that Emma wasn't really surprised that now this kind of shitty thing had to happen and fuck it up. After that first night of confession to Regina, it had been comfortable and smooth between them, no nighttime intrusions disturbing the peace or further emotional currents to navigate. She'd found herself wondering a little at Regina's willingness to play her part, asking Emma about her day when they regrouped for family dinner, solicitously inspecting her scratches and bruises after a particularly grueling couple of hours chasing Pongo out of someone's extensive briar hedge, playfully calling her "deputy" or "sheriff," claws sheathed. It felt so normal – and so utterly unlike Regina – that Emma found herself nervously testing this strange domestic bliss, trying to find the seam, where it would crack open and all the ugliness would spill out.

Henry's thoughts ran along the same line. Their alliance had been forged again over an illicit ice cream sundae at Granny's, and he was clearly pleased to have Emma back on his side for what he was calling "Operation Cobra," the undercover mission to make all the fairy tale characters realize who they truly were, about which he was ceaselessly optimistic. Emma was more skeptical. She couldn't deny the logic, though, when he said of his mother's apparent, benign domesticity, "She's just biding her time. She's waiting to do something really terrible."

When Emma caught herself agreeing, she made herself back up, reconsider. Hadn't she told Regina that she wanted to be like other couples? To be loving and considerate, to stop the constant fight for control? Maybe this was her wife trying to grant her wish. It wasn't Regina's fault that the guise fit her so imperfectly, not when she'd only donned it at Emma's insistence. (That made her feel pretty guilty. She was always resolving to bring it up, to raise the topic during their comfortably sexless nights or their occasional weekday lunch, but it just felt so damn nice to not be on guard all the time, to not be tense. She was hoping it'd help with her perpetual headache, but that lingered maliciously; for that reason, she didn't regret the lack of sex. It was probably better than they tried to be intimate without it, anyway.)

There had been no more meanness about Graham, no more fights about the dangers of the small office where Emma now worked. Of course, that'd all go to hell now.

Her hands shoved in her pockets against the cold, passing under the still, dead clock tower as she walked towards home, Emma bitterly concocted the diatribe she knew would unfold at the confession. All about how Graham couldn't be trusted, how Regina would fire him, take his property, turn him into a little bug and crush him, whatever mayors did to people they didn't like. Emma didn't want that – she really, _really _didn't want that. She was angry at him, sure, but he wasn't in his right mind – the whole town knew about his alcoholism – and, a little more selfishly, she didn't want people to see Regina running around stomping on whoever breathed in Emma's direction.

Just inside the house, Emma nudged the door shut behind her and reached down to tug off her boots, too frustrated to deal with laces right now. The return to her wardrobe of some of her old standbys had been another part of Regina's mysterious concessions to Emma's needs, but the successes of the past few weeks paled in comparison to the massive fuck-up that had taken place that night.

"Is everything alright?" Regina appeared, luminous as lamplight in the still house. "I kept a plate for you in the oven." Emma'd had to leave in the middle of dinner when Ruby called her from the diner, telling her Graham was drunk and getting a little dangerous with his dart game.

"Yeah, yeah," Emma said, running a hand through her hair and sighing. She hung up her jacket, mindful of Regina's thing about neatness. "Is Henry upstairs?"

"He's watching television," Regina said, and Emma finally spotted a place where the benevolence was wearing thin; Regina's tone was plainly displeased, the implication of Emma's bad influence laying thick on the words. There was the Regina she knew.

She couldn't help but crack a weak smile, the best she could manage under the circumstances. "On a weeknight?" she said. "I'll go in with him."

Regina smiled tightly and Emma tried a little harder to play normal, to grin at her the way she usually did. "I'll be in the study," Regina said and then, delicately, sniffed. "You smell like a distillery."

"Sorry," Emma said, immediately blushing, shamefaced. "That's, uh. That's Graham. I had to – manhandle him a little."

"Maybe you should shower before bed," Regina said, a suggestion where before it would have been a command. Emma didn't want to think about how that might change once she gave up everything that had happened.

"Yeah, will do," Emma said, moving past her quickly, towards the plate of lasagna waiting for her in the kitchen. She took it into the living room – technically breaking one of the cardinal rules of the house, which was no food anywhere outside of the kitchen or dining room _ever. _Henry grinned to see her breaking the law so openly, and they sat together, watching cartoons, no fairy tales coming up between them.

After Emma sent the kid off to his room, she went to the study, invited by the warm spill of light from under the door. She knocked gently, said, "Regina?" and let herself in.

There was something kind of beyond sexy about Regina in work mode, looking up with that expression of hard focus, lips slightly pursed, some mysterious file open in her lap. "I thought you were going to shower," she said. Emma was tempted to give up on this conversation and this whole no-sex dry spell thing they had going on, but she shook her head, letting the thought go.

"I, uh..." Emma, regretting this whole conversation already, put her hands in her pockets like a kid in the principal's office. "I wanted to tell you something."

"Well, of course, dear," Regina said, closing the folder, tucking it back in her orderly briefcase. With eyelids lowered slightly, watching Emma's face, she asked shrewdly, "Did something happen?" Then, "With Graham?"

Emma pushed out a laugh, dropping onto one of the low-slung couches. "I guess I shouldn't be so surprised," she said. "You being all-knowing and everything."

Regina gave her a pleased sort of smile; Emma couldn't tell what it was she liked so much – the compliment or something happening with Graham – and the ambiguity made her tense a little more, her headache making itself known again.

"Graham, uh..." Emma couldn't look at her directly. "When I was taking him out of Granny's, he got a little... He'd been drinking a lot, and..." She swallowed her reluctance. "He kissed me."

The silence that followed was far too deep to be safe. Just as Emma was daring to lift her gaze, Regina had already crossed the room in that silent way of hers, settling next to her on the small couch, her narrow arm around Emma's waist. "And you did... What?" Regina murmured, close to her ear, and Emma heard the edge of a blade wrapped in her seemingly gentle tone. Regina'd made Emma angry before, made her uncomfortable, made her nervous, but this was the first time Regina had ever made her truly afraid.

Emma's normal response to fear was to get angry, to get loud, but she heard her voice come out very quiet as she said, "I told him that it was over the line. That I was married to you, and – and that whatever he was looking for, he wasn't going to get it from me." The rush of adrenaline made her heart thump in her chest, so loud she could swear it was audible in the room around her; it magnified her headache like focusing light with a lens.

"Good," Regina said. She stroked Emma's hair lightly, kissed her temple. The danger remained, but it was muted now, farther away; Emma still couldn't bring herself to relax. "I trust you, Emma. I know you would never..." Another kiss, to her cheek, close to the corner of her mouth. Emma was conscious of the soft attentiveness in the touch, knowing Regina was trying to get her to open up, relax, unfold again. "Don't worry about Graham."

"He's, uh." Emma cleared her throat, trying to come back to herself. "He's in a pretty bad way, Regina. I mean – not in _danger_. But this is... I guess this has been building for a really long time. He needs help."

Regina's hand was still stroking her hair, more firmly now. "Graham's on a path to self-destruction, Emma," she said, a little of the gentleness gone from her voice, baring some of the steel. "When someone's destroying themselves that way, you can't always help them. You can't always pull them back from the edge."

"I don't believe that," Emma said, and she sounded more like herself now, firmer, shaking off some of her fright like clearing a fog. "Regina, no matter what he did, he's my friend. I have to do something. I have to believe I can help him."

"I wouldn't get your hopes up," Regina said.

"That's a really shitty thing to say, Regina," and Emma finally found her fire again, shaking off Regina's hand. "A _really _shitty thing to say. I know you don't like Graham –"

"Don't be ridiculous," Regina said. "Emma, I just want you to be realistic." Her hand came back to Emma's hair, forcefully; this time she played one of her favorite tricks, grabbing the hair at the nape of Emma's neck, effective as a leash. "Some people are just beyond help."

Emma felt really fucking far beyond help just then. "Regina –"

"Go shower," Regina told her, and it was a command this time, the facade of gentleness completely gone now. "You've had a long day. I'll be up in a few minutes."

Released, Emma got up on shaky legs, the remnants of Regina's deception bitter in her mouth. Her footfalls up the stairs were too loud; Henry's pale face poked out from behind his door. "Emma," he said. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, kid," she said, wiping quickly at her eyes, not wanting him to see. "Yeah, I'm fine. Go back to sleep."

"I wasn't asleep," he said.

"Well, you should be," she said brusquely, walking past him towards the bathroom.

"Did she hurt you?" Henry asked, but his voice was quiet as a touch, and Emma, closing the bathroom door behind her, could fool herself into thinking she hadn't heard it.

* * *

Emma found Graham again the next day, emerging from the house – returning from seeing Henry – just as the afternoon began to turn, fading with characteristic New England speed towards evening. She hadn't spoken to Regina since the night before.

"Graham, hey," she said. "I hear you're having a rough day." He didn't look obviously drunk, but she couldn't count on him not being high-functioning or something, whatever the word was.

"Who says?" he asked, pulling up short.

"Everyone," she said. She'd gotten a call at the sheriff's station from Mary Margaret Blanchard, worriedly asking if she'd done the right thing, mentioning Henry and his book of fairy tales to Graham. Neither of them thought he was dangerous, but neither of them thought he needed to be told about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves either, not in his state. "Look, how about I take you home? You can get some rest."

"I'm fine," he said, and she moved forward, saying, "No, Graham, you're not fine. You just saw a ten-year-old for help."

"He's the only one making any sense."

"What's going on, Graham?" she asked, trying to be delicate about it. "What's really going on?"

Graham looked at her, absent of any delicacy; there was an urgency in his gaze that she associated with mania. "It's my heart, Emma. I need to find my heart. I have to follow the wolf. The Evil Queen took my heart – the curse –"

Jesus. "You can't really believe that's true!" Emma insisted. A flicker of movement caught her eye over his shoulder, and Emma, recognizing it, froze.

"What?" Graham asked, and followed her gaze around to the wolf watching them from down the street.

The animal led, Graham followed, and Emma followed him; picking her way across property lines in pursuit of a wild canine, she wondered unhappily if this was all worth it. Not the helping Graham thing – the playing along with the curse, pretending all of this was somehow logical, normal, like she hadn't stepped through the looking glass into some really scary world where Henry was obsessed with some imaginary stories he molded to fit his confusing messed-up life and Regina had become – Regina hadn't become anything. There was a reason why Henry thought she was the Evil Queen. He was smarter than Emma that way. This was who Regina had been all along.

It had been in her head all night, and all day until Mary Margaret called. What had happened in the study – that was another of those not-okay things, but "not okay" seemed way too mild to describe it. Emma'd never known Regina to do anything accidentally; everything about their exchange on the sofa – and the fear that had charged her like static electricity – felt deliberate as a wound. This was what had been hiding underneath the suits and the lipstick all this time, this malevolent stranger, of whom the controlling, possessive Regina that had kept Emma under lock and key was just a pale shade.

Emma's head had been pounding for hours; her eyes hurt, the skin under them fragile and bruised, her mouth drawn and unhappy, set deep into its natural frown. She felt like she'd cried herself to sleep and never completely recovered, a small price to pay for understanding; shame she hadn't gotten there sooner. Like, before she married Regina.

Better not to think about that. She'd sink her teeth into those regrets later. Instead, she followed Graham across the town cemetery, and groaned when he declared he'd found the vault, this was where his heart was. The mausoleum was sickeningly familiar.

"Oh, Jesus, Graham, not here," she pleaded. "This is Regina's father's grave."

"I have to try," he said, rounding on her, desperation clouding his face like a storm. "I have to get my heart back, Emma – it's got to be in there." When he went to force the door in, she ran forward – out of respect for the dead? Some misplaced loyalty to Regina? – and grabbed his shoulders, pulling him back hard; his weight made her stagger enough for him to wrench away and lunge at the door again, the wood splintering, the entrance giving way.

"_Graham_," she said again, but he was already inside; she could hear him rifling through whatever people put in mausoleums besides dead people. She went up to the entrance, hanging back, not wanting to enter the musty gloom beyond the doorway, the shadows there too familiar for safety.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" said Regina from behind her; her voice, like the crack of a whip, lashed up Emma's spine. Fucking Wednesdays.

She turned to face her, feeling like a captured criminal, the finale of a Law and Order episode. "Regina," she started to say, "we –"

"It's my fault." Graham stepped out of the mausoleum, looking remarkably put-together for a man who had just been investigating grave goods for his still-beating heart. Of course, he wouldn't want Regina to know about it. "I brought Emma here."

Regina was never more beautiful than when she was angry; her dark hair seemed to crackle with energy. "Emma," she said tersely, "you don't look well. I'm taking you home."

"Regina," Emma said quietly, "Graham's not doing so well. He's tired; he's had a really long day. I'm going to take him to his place so he can get some rest. I'll meet you at home, okay?"

Regina had opened her mouth to respond, the force intended for her words clearly visible in the set line of her shoulders and the clench of her hands; Graham cut her off. "She doesn't want to go home with you, Regina," he said, stepping forward, drawing up to his full height without a slouch, the kind of macho posturing Emma _knew _was going to piss Regina off.

"Graham," Regina replied, giving him a look that made it clear exactly what she thought of interlopers. "This is between my wife and myself."

Graham moved a step or two closer, protectiveness written on every inch of him. "It's okay, Graham," Emma said. "Don't worry about it. We're going to get you home."

Ignoring her, he said, "You know, Regina, I'm not afraid anymore? You don't scare me. I'm not going to let you take her back and lock her up like you own her. Emma's a person, not a pawn."

"Yeah, and Emma's _right here_," she said, trying to get Regina and Graham to look at her or something, to break off the hard stare they were sharing.

Graham continued as though she hadn't spoken. "You can't control her anymore like you controlled me." What? "You can't make her love you by tying her down, by trapping her. She's not an animal for you to cage. If you think she loves you – God bloody knows _why _she would –" and this offense was the last Regina could take; she struck out with snakelike suddenness and Graham staggered back, clutching his jaw; there was blood on his lip and on his hand when he drew it away.

Regina wasn't letting off, moving up to him, invading his space; Emma saw Graham almost lift his hand, then, forcefully, hold back, restraining himself. Regina laughed, a low, scary noise. "Too afraid to hit a woman?" she asked, her voice breathless, husky, and Emma recognized that voice from the bedroom.

"Jesus Christ," Emma said loudly, moving forward and wedging herself between them. "Stop it. Both of you just stop it."

Graham held up his hands, surrendering; Regina stayed where she was, jaw clenched, and then backed away a step. There was a nasty little smile on her plum-red lips.

"I'm going to take Graham back to his place and get him cleaned up," Emma said firmly. "Regina –" A pair of dark eyes turned on her, and Emma's voice died away; fear licked at her again, hot and familiar from the night before. "I'll meet you at home," Emma managed to say. "Stay here and – commune with your ancestors, or something."

As suddenly as Regina had become that frightening stranger, she was herself again, straightening up a little, smoothing out her coat. Emma caught the quick little motion at Regina's side as she shook out the hand she'd hit Graham with. "Of course," Regina said. "Not too late, please. You already missed dinner."

Emma walked away, guiding Graham, and glanced once over her shoulder; Regina stood there, face shadowy and indistinct in the nighttime darkness, and what she saw as she watched them walk away Emma couldn't guess.

* * *

Graham's apartment was familiar to Emma in the way that all Main Streets, dive bars, and gas stations were familiar, a pattern you saw in every town, in every city, no matter where you went. It was a bachelor's place, shabby and dark and not very clean, the kind of apartment she might have lived in left to her own devices, the furniture and walls stained by years of smoking and drinking alone. She sat him down in the La-Z-Boy recliner and went to rattle around in the little kitchenette, finding an ice pack, a first aid kit, but could they even do anything with it? She left the kit behind, her headache pounding at her temples.

"Emma, I..." Graham touched the split skin of his lip again with a grimace. "I'm sorry."

"Yeah?" she said, and shoved the ice pack onto his jaw ungently. "We're all sorry for something."

Holding the pack in place, he gave her a look. "I shouldn't have put you in mine and Regina's fight," she said. "She and I... With our history... I was already angry at her. But seeing her with you, that made it worse. Knowing she was hurting you now."

_You can't control her anymore like you controlled me. _Emma sat down on the recliner's matching footrest and swallowed. "Your history?" she said.

He took the ice pack away from his jaw. "She didn't tell you?" He exhaled heavily. "I suppose I'm not surprised." He shook his head and closed his eyes for a moment, his face going briefly still. "Just – just know I never meant to put you in the middle of it. When I introduced you to her... I never thought..."

Emma felt something cold crackle over her, like an autumn frost, the feeling that she'd been moved around like a chess piece; Graham's words from earlier came back to her again, _Emma's a person not a pawn. _"Graham," she said softly, "I don't understand."

"Emma," Graham said, looking up at her. "In all of this... You've been the only innocent one. You were the only one who was good. I..." She saw it in his face that he wanted to kiss her again, and when he leaned forward, she didn't move away: she wanted, for just a second, to have something she recognized, understood, and she understood, at least, the need to kiss and to forget. When he pressed his mouth to hers, she felt nothing, but there was recognition in his eyes when he drew away.

"Emma," he said. "I remember." There was a clarity in his face that called out to her; whatever he felt, something finally stirred in her in answer. He parted his lips again, but his next indrawn breath was a gasp of pain.

"Graham?" Emma scrambled up; Graham couldn't seem to catch his breath, he choked on it, his hand scrabbling at his chest. She reached out for him, seeing her hands move like they were someone else's hands, watching Graham stare up at her with wide unbelieving eyes. His weight in her arms carried her down to the floor, his lean frame sprawled in her lap; his mouth moved, a noise leaving him, but was it a death rattle or was it a word, Emma couldn't tell.

She shook him. "Graham!" She felt herself crying in the onrush of loss and fear, her eyes hurting with tears and with that fucking headache. His body was still and heavier than before, and when she put her head down to listen for a breath, to catch the whisper of a heartbeat, she heard nothing.

In the haze of sirens that followed, Emma wondered blankly who'd called an ambulance. It wasn't as though the EMTs from Storybrooke General could do anything about Graham, who was slack and dead on the gurney. She followed them step by rattling step down the stairs and out into the glare of the ambulance lights.

"Emma?" Regina, haloed by headlights, descended on her, an angel in black. Emma, her head still pounding, felt herself being drawn in, hungry for someone to tell her what to do and how to feel. She put her hands on Regina's sides and buried her face against her wife's shoulder.

"I'm taking her home," she heard Regina say in her clipped mayoral voice to the nearest person. "I trust you'll contact my office if you need to speak with us." Those were all reassuring words, _home, trust, us, _and Emma, her head fuzzy, let herself be wrapped in them, warming herself by Regina's take-charge tone.

Regina guided her, step by stumbling step, to the Mercedes, and then drove, with neat efficiency. "Come on," Regina said, bringing Emma up the steps of the front porch. "Not much farther now, Emma."

Inside, Henry's voice echoed to them from the top of the stairs. "Emma! Are you okay?" Then his tone grew hard, he was addressing Regina: "What did you _do_?"

"Henry, go to bed!" Regina snapped back at him, louder than usual; she hated having voices raised in her house.

Emma wanted to keel over, and she might have if Regina hadn't sat her down so firmly in the study. She put her face in her hands and didn't respond when Regina told her she was going to go get her a drink; she accepted the glass of scotch and water when it nudged her hand.

Regina's weight settled next to her and a hand stroked down her back, brushed her hair out of her face tenderly.

"Regina?" Emma's own voice sounded far away, as though coming to her through water. "How did... Jesus..." The scotch burned going down, but it seemed to snap her back to herself. "How could... I was just with him, he was just alive, and..." She'd seen a lot of people die before their time, but never in her arms, not like that.

"He was sick, Emma," Regina said soothingly; she gathered Emma into her arms as tenderly as she might a child, and Emma's headache began to beat in tandem to the sound of Regina's heart. "Sometimes people burn out. There was nothing you could do."

Surrounded by her wife's warm apple smell, Emma relaxed by slow degrees; a voice sounded suddenly behind the darkness of her eyes, _some people are just beyond help, _and then _when I introduced you to her... I never thought... _God, could she just fucking get out of her own head for once, could the echo chamber just quiet down, but there was Graham again, _in all of this you've been the only innocent one,_and the fear she remembered from the mausoleum, the fear from this same spot, being in Regina's arms, surged up in her; she felt like Dorothy falling to sleep amid a field of poisonous poppies, betrayed by her exhaustion, desperate for the comfort of slumber beyond dreams.

"Regina," she said, and pulled away. The glass shook in her hands. Regina's soft, lovely face was all tender concern, a flash there of the human frailty that Emma loved, but she didn't see it; she saw the stranger's face, the other Regina. _I remember_, Graham told her, his face clear as a window, and Henry warned her _she's waiting to do something really terrible. _"Regina, did you have something to do with this?"

Emma didn't know if it was pure paranoia or what, but she could have sworn that Regina's incredulous expression took a beat too long to surface.

"What?" Regina said. "Are you joking?"

Emma felt like gravity was sitting heavier on her than usual. "Do I look like I'm laughing?" she said quietly.

"I understand that you've had a very difficult night," Regina replied unkindly, "but I hope even _you _can tell how ridiculous you sound right now."

"You had a fight with Graham," Emma said, putting down her glass, getting onto her wobbly feet slowly. "Not even an hour before he died."

"So, what?" Regina got up as well, faster than Emma could. "I induced heart failure with the power of my fist?" Regina sneered; somehow, impossibly, the malicious cant to her features made her even more beautiful, like a natural disaster. "That's far-fetched, even for you, _Miss Swan_."

Emma stood her ground as Regina advanced on her, and the headache ripping at the inside of her skull was like a warning. "Need I remind you," Regina said, "that you are only a sheriff's _deputy, _with no _formal police training_, and no grounds for these accusations?" Then Regina straightened slightly, assuming her pose again, playing wife. "You've had a long day," she added. "Go to bed. You'll forget all this in the morning."

"Yeah," Emma said. "When you appoint a new sheriff and trap me in this house again."

There was the malevolence she now knew, teased out from under the surface by her accusations. "Don't be ridiculous," Regina spat.

"I can't stay here, Regina," she said. "Not after what you did."

"Please, Emma, what is it you _imagine _I did to Graham?" Regina moved forward again, invading her space. "Tell me."

"I don't know," she said. "I don't, but I know you did something." She pushed on, away from Regina, leaving the study.

"So that's it?" Regina demanded, pursuing, sneering to see Emma, still woozy, nearly overbalance when she tried to shove her feet back into her boots. "You're just leaving? Based on these – these paranoid inventions of yours?"

"Maybe I _am _paranoid," Emma agreed, feeling the scotch burn in her empty stomach; her conviction burned still hotter. "But this has been a long time coming and you and I both know that." She kicked the toe of her boot against the floor, sliding her foot into place, and thought, _Henry,_nearly stopping herself,but she knew the moment his name occurred to her that he was safe to leave behind for now: he was the only person in the world Regina would never hurt, and if she took him Regina'd probably make a case for kidnapping to that creepy prosecutor.

Emma picked up her coat and was shoving her arm into one sleeve, turning the doorknob with her other hand, when Regina manifested behind her, one hand flat on the door, shoving it closed again.

"If you walk out that door," Regina breathed into her ear, "if you leave me, you are _never _coming back." Her other hand came to rest on Emma's other side, against the door frame, pinning her.

Emma closed her eyes, surrounded by Regina, feeling the weight of her as though she were underwater, crushed on all sides by the killing pressure of deep ocean blackness. Then she turned the doorknob again and pulled the door open at the same time as she pushed back against Regina with one shoulder. Regina staggered and fell back, the first stair up to the foyer catching her at the ankle. Emma heard rather than saw her land.

"Emma, no." Emma was already a step out the door. Regina's voice got louder. "No! Emma, _don't go! _Don't you dare – don't you _dare _leave me! _Emma!_"

Regina's stricken voice, thick with fear and choked by what sounded too much like pain, faded out as Emma headed down the front walk. Far away above the stirring, restless town, the broken clock tower tolled the hour.

* * *

_Note: Well! There it is! The final chapter. Thank you all for coming this far with me. This has been an incredible exercise and I've learned so much from exploring it, not just through the process of writing but through your reviews and your helpful criticisms. This piece isn't perfect, but it's mine and I'm happy with it, and I'm so glad I've had the time, opportunity, and support to follow through with its completion. Thank you so, so much for going through this with me and for reading, for reviewing, for following. I am beyond grateful._

_See you in the sequel. ;)_


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